Tuesday, August 23, 2016

So About Our Long Blog Post Hiatus...

Well... it's been some time. Our last blog post (not including the previously sponsored one) was back 9 months ago in November. Simply tons of things have happened in that time and it's about damn time to get this site (and the anime figure store) back in gear. There is just too much going on not to talk about and with a number of anime, gaming and pop culture blogs/sites, most much younger than this site getting too much lime light (and some falling off the deep end of selling out)....I think it's about time we keep our hands game....or am I just talking to myself here?

Where the hell have we been? (wait, didn't I ask this in the last post?!?)

The last post talked about something that finally happened in the 16+ years I've been working a job and something sadly most of us today might never experience... 1) being treated like a human being and equal at the job 2) being in the field / job you wanted to.

To somewhat summarize..I was trying to get out of a dead end "web dev" job. I almost did that with the anime figure business and voice acting when Hurricane Sandy wiped much of that away (well, much of the figure business that is; voice acting helped a bit after). Since the late 90's and after many years of being told of how stupid I was for doing it by "professionals" in Computer Science, I was always looking to be a game / app developer. The forever unfinished game Tenshi-Oni and the characters from it whom are the mascots of this site came from a flash game idea I started in 2003. Then I moved to IOS native and almost got Tenshi-Oni rolling out on IOS in 2012; yet another victim of that storm's aftermath. This later turned to Unity development.

With voice acting picking up and getting the honor to write my own published IOS development book, I somehow broke free from the IT recruiter purgatory and got a Unity developer job in NYC for a major production company. They sadly were wolves in sheep's clothing and I actually flat out quit them for the sake of my sanity and to not give such terribly ran places the satisfaction of having developers at 1/4th the pay and 4x the workload/stress. During that time, my anime figure store's php code got nerfed by some .htaccess hack that I to this day haven't had the chance to undo. (just frontend stuff, nothing else in terms of logins and whatnot)

There was a silver lining in me quitting as within that week I got scooped up by a smaller yet much more awesome group of developers in NYC who were in desperate need for a Unity developer who worked with game and particularly non game work; something I did exclusively for the few months I was with that horrid & vapid production company. Working with non game applications in Unity was (and still kind of is) something almost nobody is doing so I instantly became a need asset for this and other companies. This was ALL without the help from IT recruiters who now more than ever come to me with roles, to which I gladly say, "sorry, I'm taken." It's seriously like relationships...the moment you are taken, people want you.

Speaking of relationships. I started this site only a month before I met my fiancee Danielle in April of 2002 and we got engaged..get this.. Xmas eve 2007. The various trials of life always kept the wedding and a chance to move on in life far away. Thing is, in about 3 weeks, Danielle and I will be finally married...FINALLY! The wedding ceremony was officially signed for back in January....near the beginning of this long blog hiatus.

Up until now, the Unity work was indeed rather grueling with any all nighters and weeks of crazy debugging and fixes. The app was for an awesome famous beer company who made the process much easier to bare (unlike the jewelry client I had the misfortune to work with under that production company).

However, to think I've abandoned this blog, the site, the figure store, Tenshi-Oni and the voice acting you are completely wrong ^_^

This crazy 2016 year:

So... if there aren't many posts after the one.. soon after the wedding on Sept 10th and the much needed 2 week honeymoon vacation, we will be hard at work to get back to regular posts, finally get the store back up, back to Tenshi-Oni work and maybe upgrade the look and feel of our sites as well. (feeling very 2007 around here).

This year has been the most insane, eventful year I have ever witnessed in my almost 33 years alive; not just for me personally but in terms of public news and events.. from the insanity brought on by Pokemon GO last month, to the anime and gaming news, to the wonderful and much needed death of Gawker and to the explosion in new emerging tech. There is just too much to talk about and we should have been talking about more. The internet moves fast and forgets fast but as always, we are still here and will soon catch the next wave back into the fray.